LS Next Installment of Magnus-Jonathan dialogue


Jonathan B. Marder (marder@agri.huji.ac.il)
Sat, 11 Jul 1998 04:40:51 +0100


Hi Magnus, Squad,

Magnus wrote:-
>A few harsh words now and then
>can be useful to stir up emotions and receive another angle.

I concede that. I've nothing against a bit of rheoric to spice up the
dialectical debate;-)

>... why don't you include other patterns than intellectual in SQ?

I think that I may be causing problems by using the word "intellect" in
the way I do. I'm talking about something akin to "mind", but not
exactly in the sense of mind vs. matter.
I think that it will make things much clearer if I simply omit using the
word "intellectual" altogether. The key word in my discussion with
Magnus is the word "pattern". I think that Magnus sees pattern as
something entirely objective, while I claim that patterns are constructs
of mind created to summarize and understand experience. The reality we
know is the summation of all those patterns.

>I'm referring to your definition of SQ, "intellectualised
>description of DQ". If SQ is only intellectual patterns of
>other patterns, it means that the static ladder, the level
>hierarchy, collapses and becomes a just-what-you-like-morality
>instead of the moral ladder described in Lila, Pirsig writes,
>"The physical order of the universe is also the moral order
>of the universe".

By editing out the "intellectuallized", my revised definition of SQ is
"description of DQ", or the patterns which describe DQ. The level
hierarchy
is such an SQ pattern.

>It also means that the static ladder, the moral ladder,
>becomes an intellectual construct imposed on intellectual
>patterns of other patterns. It no longer has any direct
>connection with reality.

Not exactly. Morality is a guiding force in how the patterns are created
and
arranged.
It is not unconnected to reality, but a part of the reality we know.

>
>I also think your definition means, as you said in your
>original post, "it brings back the mind-matter split in full
>force". It seems to imply that all that matters is the
>intellectual patterns of other patterns, and that sounds
>much like idealism to me.

As I noted earlier in this post, I do see patterns as constructs of
mind. But I also see matter as a pattern, so it isn't really a
mind-matter split at all. I'm not sure what to call the counterpart of
mind, maybe experience or even DQ itself.

>> But change of patterns is also a pattern - as long as one can grasp
>> the underlying complexity.
>
>Sure, that is why we do science, to find patterns and be able to
>predict events that are currently unpredictable. Science is gradually
>pushing the border between SQ and DQ.
>

That implies that DQ and SQ are fundamentally the same, or share a
dimension. SQ isn't just capsulated DQ. Science cannot consume DQ.
However, it can open our eyes to DQ by recognising new phenomena.

>BUT, and this is the *big* but, science will never push the border all
>the way. If everything were static and patterned, nothing new and truly
>original would ever occur. Nothing would ever change or be created. We
>wouldn't be here, earth wouldn't be here, the universe would simply not
>have become.

I'll repeat, SQ is description. You can't stop anything happening just
by
describing it. What SQ might determine though is whether that occurrence
is
perceived as new or not.

>> To be perfectly honest, I can see some value in what Sojourner has now
>> suggested:-
>> >DQ = energy
>> >SQ = matter
>>[snip] DQ=energy, the cause of change, sounds pretty good to me.

>If matter and energy are just different ways of looking at the same
>thing, why separate them with an SQ/DQ split? To be blunt, matter and
>energy are inorganic SPoV. You'll have a hard time trying to convince
>me otherwise.
Actually, you may have noticed that I stopped short of endorsing the
SQ=matter idea. I completely agree that matter and energy as physical
concepts are patterns that Pirsig would call inorganic. What's
interesting though is that all physical units for energy are somehow
related to matter. We have no other understanding of the energy concept.
Then again, even if we do say that DQ=energy, as soon as we try to
define or understand that energy we end up with .. ...........

Magnus, is anything clarified?

Regards,
Jonathan

 



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